No sooner do I produce a blog about why I didn’t vote on BGT, than I’m now whacking one out about voting on Eurovision.

For my readers across t’pond who may not have experienced this annual phenomenon, it’s a song contest where the nations of Europe (and nowadays the former Soviet Union states, plus a few hangers-on) compete to produce the tackiest song: the “top” 26, as voted for in an excruciating series of semi-finals, get to occupy four and a half hours of prime time television across the continent, and then all nations (including those that didn’t make it to the final) take part in an arcane voting process where the more political nations vote for their friends and a few vote for what they thought was the best song. Although this year had an interesting twist – the national broadcaster of the winning nation has to pay to host next year’s spectacular, so in the current austere times there were a few nations doing their best NOT to win.

Anyway, this year’s feast of tat included Jedward singing for Ireland, Englebert Humperdinck for the United Kingdom, camp acts from a dozen nations (nothing wrong with camp, it’s a Eurovision standard), and some singing grannies from Russia who sang “Everybody dance, it’s a party for everyone” while baking buns on stage, and who, if they won, were going to give the prize money to save their church.

The maddest dance act of the night (and really the only dance act that lived up to the Eurovision norm) came from Moldova, and the campest was a Village People-esque group of Turkish sailors in capes.

Anyway, we couldn’t decide who to vote for, so as there were three of us – and it was only fifteen pees a go – we had three votes, one each for the grannies – because we thought they were fun; Moldova – because we wanted to see that dance act one more time, and Turkey – for more or less the same reason. In the end it didn’t make much difference, but it was exciting for a while!

And for no better reason than I can, here are those Moldovans…

The Grannies (not sure why, but the audio on this clip makes them sound a lot worse than they did on the night)…

And the Turks.

This entry was posted
on Sunday, May 27th, 2012 at 10:09 am and is filed under All Me Stuff, Weird stuff I noticed.
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